BRILLIANT article by Bill Bennett here.

1. Cripple its chances of reaching editors and journalists

Everyone can read plain text messages contained in the body of an email. The message will almost certainly get through to any kind of desktop email clients, all flavours of web mail, as well as blackberries, iPhones and Palm Pilots.To reach less than 100 percent of your potential audience try putting some of the following clever barriers in the way.

Attachments are a very effective way of cutting down the reach of your press release. People reading email on mobile devices often have trouble reading them. Spam filters can treat them with suspicion and if you’re really lucky the recipient may use Lotus Notes as a client and have difficulty decoding the attachment.

Another advantage of attachments is that you can trim your audience further by using difficult-to-open file formats: for example the new .docx file format used by Word 2007 – many journalists will struggle to read them. Attachments are great for bulking up the size of your releases so they won’t squeeze through email gateways. If you’re really clever you can put high resolution logos in, say, your Word attachments.  These add absolutely nothing to the press release but can swiftly push the file size over the gateway threshold.

Read the rest…

• My rapidly growing email habit
• Seven deadly PR sins
• Voicemail is dead.
• Goodbye Outlook: hello Google Calendar
• GMail's missed potential

Tags: Journalism